Two and a half thousand spectators in the hall and tens of thousands worldwide in the internet stream watched the spectacular performance of Dimitrij Ovtcharov on Wednesday evening. What no one noticed from the table tennis professional: Between the five exciting sets, the 35-year-old Düsseldorf resident worried that his match against the Swede Mattias Falck, which had been exhausted to the last point and lasted 47 minutes, might become boring for his seven-year-old daughter Emma Grandstand. “I was worried it would be a bit long for them and for that reason I would have preferred to win 3-0,” he joked afterwards. This is how fathers, including competitive athletes, tick in action.
Ovtcharov could have suspected this. “I don’t play as close against anyone as often as against Mattias Falck,” he said, remembering a whole series of similarly exciting Swedish crime thrillers. This time he won 11:9 in the ultimate fifth set against the 2019 World Cup runner-up in the round of 16 of this world-class $500,000 tournament in Frankfurt. With the points for success, he finally qualified for the finals of the lucrative World Table Tennis series in Doha at the beginning of January, but before big money is at stake there again in two months, Ovtcharov gets it in the quarter-finals this Friday in Frankfurt probably has to do with the Chinese Olympic champion named Ma Long (only at the time of going to press he was the clear favorite against the Egyptian Omar Assar), against whom he played his best game to date at the Olympics in Tokyo two years ago – and his most painful.
About his seven-set defeat 9:11 in the final round of the 2021 Olympic singles semi-finals in Tokyo, Ovtcharov says today, not entirely wrongly: “That was perhaps one of the best table tennis games of all time.” He doesn’t mean: one of his best. He really means: one of the best ever. That night he desperately thought about retiring; the missed sensation that could have resulted in Olympic victory was too painful for him. “It was the most formative game I have ever played, a game has never hurt me as much as this one,” he recalled on Wednesday evening. But it’s good that he didn’t end his career then. The next day he won Olympic bronze against the Taiwanese Lin Yun-ju. He says: “With the necessary distance, I’m proud of the game against Ma Long and of subsequently winning bronze.”
Ovtcharov’s record against Ma Long is 0:19 – high time for his first win against the Olympic champion
So now the likely revenge against Ma Long in Frankfurt. In front of a home crowd. Maybe that will help, even if Ovtcharov suspects that he will hardly be able to play as well as he did two years ago in Tokyo. But Ma Long doesn’t appear to be in optimal form at the moment either. The Chinese in general: Of the four men in the Frankfurt field on Wednesday, two of them, Lian Jinkung and the world champion and world number one Fan Zhendong, were actually eliminated in the round of 16. Something like that borders on a miracle, but Ovtcharov apparently wasn’t all that surprised. “There have been a lot of big events in Asia recently, and of course they are much more convenient for the Chinese – now they have to fly long distances, have jet lag, and then something like this happens.”
Jet lag or not, Ovtcharov’s record against Ma Long is actually: 0:19. “He’s a forehand-dominant player, and that doesn’t suit me well in terms of the system,” says Ovtcharov, “I’m simply better against backhand-dominant players.” The 35-year-old Ma Long, with his five gold Olympic and 13 gold World Cup medals, is considered by many to be the best table tennis player – Ovtcharov agrees: “He is the best player of all time, and you don’t have to be ashamed of having lost to him so often to have.” Nevertheless, he would find a victory in the 20th duel quite pleasant.
And then it will soon be the Olympics again. Next summer in Paris. There is no question for Ovtcharov that he will then compete in his fifth Olympic Games; with six Olympic medals in total, he is actually the table tennis world record holder. “Nominations will take place in April, but my goal is not just to be there, but to be successful in Paris,” he says. For this reason too, he, together with Dang Qiu, Patrick Franziska and national coach Jörg Roßkopf, recently skipped the European Team Championships in Malmö and believes that the tough training sessions in the performance center in Düsseldorf instead were worth it. “If I hadn’t given up on the European Championships, I wouldn’t have been able to build up the substance that I have now. We’ve trained an incredible amount, I’m getting better and better and I’m significantly further along than I was three months ago.”
Frankfurt is his last tournament this year. Intensive training is scheduled again until Christmas, then we head to Doha. The little daughter Emma is not flying with us. So there’s no risk of getting bored there.
